


(i want to) hold your hand

by storytellingape



Category: Crash Pad (2017), Logan Lucky (2017), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drunken Shenanigans, Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 11:48:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13213101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storytellingape/pseuds/storytellingape
Summary: Stensland wakes up one morning and finds himself in that bartender's bed.





	(i want to) hold your hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MajaLi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajaLi/gifts), [rmn_werefoxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rmn_werefoxes/gifts).



> This is so niche and also happens to be my first contribution to his fandom besides uh shit posts on twitter, but I would like to dedicate this to my friends [@hurtkylo](https://twitter.com/hurtkylo) and [@maja_li](https://twitter.com/maja_li) without whom this will not be possible. It's self indulgent, silly, and SOFT lol but I kind of wanted to write it with the same kind of wackiness as Crash Pad. 
> 
> [Here's the trailer of the movie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm0vmm8k0ks) which I guess is a lesser known film than Logan Lucky. Basically the premise is Stensland (Domhnall's character) is a [hapless twenty-something](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51b3dc8ee4b051b96ceb10de/t/59a5d8f912abd9d8b6061522/1504041212960/) who falls in love with a married woman named Morgan after a one night stand. He's needy, easily attached and aimless, and [has a thing for a specific furniture store](https://i0.wp.com/thatmomentin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Screen-Shot-2017-09-27-at-8.12.07-PM.png?fit=1018%2C661) AND DAWSON'S CREEK. Also he believes Morgan is the love of his life after she holds his hand in the cab, lol. 
> 
> Clyde Logan clips for reference may be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5lOTiYdqf4) and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXhT6GVFflo).
> 
> I love these two. Thank you for reading! For more faffery please feel free to say hi [@softgingertwink](https://twitter.com/softgingertwink)!

 

* * *

 

Relocating to Dingy, West Virginia had been a terrible idea but by the time Stensland is hit with this sweeping realization, he’s already a month deep into his tenure as assistant manager for the West Virginia branch of Soft Solutions Furniture. Also, he’s missing his trousers and can’t seem to remember where he put his shoes. 

Waking up with a hangover seems par for the course these days as he so often likes to drink himself to a stupor in an effort to combat nightly bouts of existential anxiety, but this is the first time in a long time that he’s blacked out and actually come to in a stranger’s bed. He’s come a long way since he moved locales after the Morgan Incident; backsliding into old habits is just going to set him two steps back from becoming a better adult generally. But maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here about mixing shots with brown-eyed bartenders. Maybe it isn’t all for naught.

Thankfully, Stensland’s woken up alone and the hangover isn’t quite as intense, though he still feels like someone dipped his entire body in honey and dragged him across gravel while he slept. 

He presses his hands to his face and groans before assessing his whereabouts blearily: the walls are lined with old fashioned seventies wood paneling, and there’s a table pushed under a casement window covered with an assortment of personal bric-a-brac: an old wristwatch with the leather abraded, a class ring, a half-open bottle of Tylenol. A desk lamp with an adjustable neck like the kind they had on the Brady Bunch sits on the nightstand next to the bed, and right across the room on a stuffed armchair with tears in the cushion, is a baby blue robe folded neatly for the taking. 

There’s really nothing to it; Stensland takes the robe after calling off the search for his trousers, fastening the ties loosely around his waist. He steps out into the hall on bare feet, assaulted immediately by the smell of cooking breakfast which makes his stomach pinch up just a tiny bit. There’s music playing in the background, something Stensland recognizes that’s too soft to name, crackling with static and buzzing like a lazy fly. When he’s made it all the way to the den, the sight of the overly large bartender from last night laying food on a rickety breakfast table makes him stop dead in his tracks. 

“Hello,” Stensland says stupidly, and then remembers the man’s name. _Clyde_. It had been Clyde — Clyde of the strong drinks and generous pour from that incongruously named bar down town; Clyde, who conveniently forgets Stensland’s tab and listens to him talk. A good guy, and almost-friend who sometimes warbles country songs in that deep-voiced croon of his, loud enough so that only a select few are privy to it when the crowd at the bar has thinned to a trickle.

It’s not the first time Stensland has seen Clyde outside that dimly lit bar that he owns — he’sseen him in broad daylight of course; they live in such a small town it’s impossible not to run into the other. He’s come around the furniture store a few times for lighting fixtures and whatever reason, but it’s the first time Stensland has seen Clyde in raggedy shorts and a tatty tank top that does little to conceal, well — Clyde has um, nice arms and it’s well evident he takes very good care of himself. Very good care. His chest is thick, well defined like the hull of a particularly sturdy ship. A barge maybe.

“Er,” Stensland says and tries not to ogle the rest of him. “Good morning?”

Clyde finishes setting the table. He accomplishes this the way he does all things, one-handed, and without missing a beat. His prosthetic arm is nowhere in sight, and Stensland wonders briefly what that must feel like, if he wakes up every morning missing his hand and has a mini freak out, because Stensland certainly would. Clyde’s hair is in its usual messy fashion, wavy and shading his face, but something about the hour, or maybe it’s the light that’s filtering in through the screened windows that’s making it seem soft and touchable somehow. 

“Mornin’,” Clyde says, breaking Stensland out of his trance. They stand there staring at each other awkwardly for a long uninterrupted minute before smoke starts to stink up the kitchen and Clyde scrambles to save the rest of his bacon in a panic. He stirs up quite the racket, banging pans with minimal cussing, while Stensland seats himself at the table and deliberately squirms in his chair to check for any… injuries, head in his hands. His arse doesn’t seem to ache, which is… always a good sign. 

Clyde is a handsome man, but Stensland has never thought of him in that way before. _Hands_. Stensland’s thought about his hands. But then again, Stensland thinks, as Clyde returns with a fresh plate of crispy bacon, face completely grim, that’s not completely true either. He’s thought about more than just Clyde’s hand(s), but just in the idle way he thought of any attractive person, and none of it ever made it to Stensland’s daily jerk off sessions. _Often_. Clyde’s attractiveness was just one of the things Stensland knew about him; an empirical fact, like the size of him, obvious even at first glance.

“You don’t happen to know where the rest of my clothes are, do you?” Stensland asks after another period of awkward silence. Clyde has poured him some coffee in the interim; it’s a little bit stronger than Stensland would like, but it’s enough to kickstart him into a state of semi-wakefulness. As soon as the caffeine hits, he realizes two things: one he’s wearing someone else’s shirt and it must be Clyde’s on account of how the sleeves are hanging off his elbows. And two, well, at least he’s still got his own underwear on to preserve his dignity which he doesn’t seem to possess much of these days. 

Neither of them has started eating even though it’s been roughly five minutes since Clyde has set the table and the bacon is cooked to a fine crisp, exactly how Stensland’s mum used to make them. 

Clyde looks up just as he’s about to speak, but his mouth is set in an unreadable line which makes Stensland tense up. It’s Clyde’s sheer size — half the time Stensland is caught in a pendulum of startled lust and aroused fright. He can never tell what Clyde is thinking; even before when he’d tried to flirt with him at the bar to wheedle free drinks, he was met with a stone wall of unblinking silence that he had chalked off as lack of interest. Now he recognizes that it’s just Clyde’s general air.

“I put them in the wash last night,” Clyde says, “You got puke all over yourself,” Then he starts picking at his food, refusing to look Stensland in the eye again. 

“Oh, Jesus.” Stensland buries his face in his hands. “Oh _Jesus_ — so we didn’t—” He peeks at Clyde between his spread fingers. “Did we?” He tries so smother the hope bubbling in his chest.

Clyde looks over at him. His face is still unreadable which shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s the sympathy in them that knocks Stensland off kilter a little. 

“Tell you what,” Clyde says, “How’s about you get some breakfast in you first, and then we can talk about what happened last night.”

“That sounds…good. Yeah,” Stensland agrees, mostly because he’s a little hungry himself and there’s nothing else a man can do without any trousers on or his shoes. He can do this at least; eating is easy. After: well, that comes later. Maybe Clyde will tell him where he’s hidden his shoes.

They chew their bacon in relative silence, to the drone of country music in the background whose source Stensland has yet to identify. It’s nice like this, almost peaceful but because Stensland possesses the uncanny knack to turn any kind of agreeable mood around, he says, just because he can’t help himself, “It’s really a pity we didn’t…You know.”He barely holds off on making a crude gesture miming a blowjob, then regrets ever being conceived in a toolshed at a primary school when Clyde gapes at him and starts to choke a little on his food, thumping a fist across his chest.

“Well,” Clyde says, clearing his throat several times. He appears to not know where to look besides the walls. “You kinda kissed me and then started cryin’ and I din’t know what else to do so I brought you home with me. You said you din’t want to be alone last night so I kept you company.”

“Like in the _Catholic_ sense,” Stensland clarifies, and when Clyde blinks at him, he says more meaningfully, “Did you um, put your wie—” Clyde cuts him off with a look. It’s a look that could mean many things but Stensland wisely takes it as his cue to stop talking. It’s also about the same time a wave of hazy memories starts to hit him like a sucker punch, each one vying for his attention, but fuzzier than the last. It’s a bit like peering through the bottom of a shot glass, everything blurred by the murk of alcohol but also magnified by it at the same time: Stensland remembers stumbling out of the bar late last night, falling onto his hands and knees and then crawling across a gravel lot to the scooter that serves as his only means of transport because he’s still terrified of getting anywhere near an American car. He remembers the bartender — Clyde, of course, and his big brown eyes, his even bigger hand, and then waking up the next moment in Clyde’s living room, humping his lap with a shirtful of his own vomit and a painful erection heavy enough to topple the Berlin wall were it still standing. But still: no clear idea how he got there. Clyde just sort of sat there and took it, looking concerned and maybe a little distraught and red in the face, his own erection digging into Stensland’s thigh though he barely moved an inch and let Stensland exhaust himself until he felt sick from all the moving. Stensland didn’t come, but afterwards when he couldn’t quite control the lolling of his head, Clyde put him to bed though not before hosing him down in the shower where Stensland alternated between flailing like a disgruntled cat and moaning in exhaustion. 

The last thing, which seems important somehow that he remember, is Stensland hanging off Clyde’s arm like a limpet, begging him not to go because he’s terrified of cayotes and getting mauled in his sleep. Clyde had sat down on the edge of the bed and chuckled at him, the handsome bastard, and then flicked him gently on the forehead before telling him there were no cayotes, not for miles, not in a long while anyway ever since they built that Starbucks. Stensland grabbed his hand in a sort of panic, and minutes later, he was fast asleep, wrapped around Clyde’s arm like he was a squirrel attempting to climb him like a tree. 

“Okay,” Stensland says slowly, feeling suddenly sheepish, flush high in his cheeks. “Okay, yeah, that does sound like me. Heh.”

Stensland chews on the last remaining strip of bacon, while Clyde continues to say nothing, pushing his eggs around on his plate before scraping it to one side. Finally, he stands up and goes to wash up in the kitchen. Stensland hears the tap turn on, plates in the sink, a cabinet whinging open and then banging shut. It takes him approximately five seconds to get up and go after Clyde, crowding him in the doorway before Stensland himself has the opportunity to think carefully about what he’s about to say next. 

“Look, I know you probably think I’m a mess, and I’ve never been with a man before, but goddamnit, I like you, all right? Because you’re very… very… Hot. And um, you’re nice to me. And maybe, maybe we should try dating each other?” He tries not to look overly hopeful. He’s always been a desperate romantic, falling for anyone who showed him the barest minimum of affection, but Clyde had held his hand in his sleep, and that should count for something if the Beatles had thought to write a song about it and it made number one on the charts in the spring of 1964. 

Hand-holding. Hand-holding was important. It was the universal sign for, if not love, then the start of… something. Morgan had done it too on the cab ride back to her apartment, but something about this time feels different. The irony that Clyde is one appendage short is not loss on Stensland. 

Clyde blinks at him, once, and then again, and finishes putting away the dishes as if Stensland hadn’t just bared his heart and soul. Never mind that; he’s used to his dignity being stomped on gleefully. This is just another one in a long line of what could have beens. It takes some effort to keep his chin from wobbling.

Stensland lets out a little whimper of surprise when Clyde walks over to him, very suddenly and determinedly closing the remaining distance between them and trapping him against the wall right next to the mounted landline with the notepad. He’s not expecting any of it, seizing up immediately until Clyde reaches up to touch his arm as if to keep him from bolting. He’s got a nice hand, Clyde, big and gentle and making Stensland want to lean into his touch. If he still had both of them, Stensland can only imagine what he would feel like to be held by them: soft inside, probably — because it was stuff like that that made him weak in the knees — like he were made of clay, with Clyde to make and unmake him any way he saw fit. 

“All right now,” Clyde says, and the way he says it, overlaid with the accent, makes Stensland’s spine sing with unexpected pleasure.  “So what’s this about datin’?” 

Stensland lets out a nervous laugh. He can smell Clyde, a general scent of musty shirt and coffee, and the mint in the shampoo he uses, from this close. 

It’s a nice scent, and it makes Stensland’s nostrils flare just a tiny bit when Clyde maneuvers even close enough for it to feel like an invasion of personal space. 

“I just wanted to like, uh, declare myself,” Stensland says, stammering. “My intentions.” It occurs to Stensland he has no idea what any of them are. All he knows is, Clyde is _good_. And being around him is even better. 

“You’re so pretty right now I could kiss that look right off your face,” Clyde tells him, his face so serious Stensland jerks up in alarm.

“What? What look?” Stensland says, hand flying to his cheek to rub at an invisible stain.

And then Clyde puts his hand on Stensland, and Stensland is briefly overtaken by the thought that he’s going to be kissed, and then finally, ostensibly, he _is_ , kissed like he’s dreamt of being kissed, softly, just like in a movie — or like in Dawson’s Creek season three, episode four, when Pacey finally confesses his feelings to Joey and takes her by surprise there by the lake. It doesn’t last long, unfortunately, which can be said for most of Stensland’s sexual encounters, but when Clyde leans back to search Stensland’s face, his gaze imploring, Stensland has a fleeting feeling this will not be the last time he’ll ever be kissed like that. He shivers, closing his eyes, and Clyde kisses him again, before he seems to remember his manners and asks for Stensland’s express permission to do it again, as if Stensland isn’t already swooning into him like the heroine of some romance novel, his hands fisted in Clyde’s shirt, his thighs parting in increments. His head is buzzing pleasantly by the time Clyde is finished with him, his lips fat with a sheen of wet.

When Stensland tips his head back, he’s surprised to find Clyde cupping the back of it. 

“Now, I don’t wanna seem bold,” Clyde says, “but I would like to take you out to dinner some time and if you’d like, we could go see a movie of your choice down at the —” Stensland giggles, causing Clyde to pause, which in turn has Stensland opening his eyes again to glimpse the confused smile dimpling Clyde’s cheek. 

“What? What’d I say?” says Clyde, tilting his head to one side like an overgrown dog. 

“Clyde Logan, just fuck me already and be done with it. Enough with the pussyfooting around— _oof_!” 

Stensland doesn’t protest to being hefted over one shoulder or being carried back to the bedroom like a sack of grain before being unceremoniously dumped on his arse on the bed. 

Later, with his knees boxing Clyde’s ears, he throws an arm over his face before shouting up at the ceiling. “Yes, okay, take me out for a lovely candlelit dinner just don’t stop doing that thing with your tongue! Clyde!” He hears Clyde laugh, a slow tremor that runs all the way up his thighs into the center of him like an earthquake, and then Stensland is gone, blanking out completely, anchored back to the present only by the tug of Clyde’s hand. 

“Hey little darlin’,” Clyde says. “You all right? I thought you was goin’ into shock.” 

“You held my hand,” Stensland mumbles, later in the aftermath, face half-buried in Clyde’s armpit, squirming against his side. 

“Hm?” Clyde says. “What now?”

“Nothing,” Stensland mutters. He already knows what it means though it still feels a little silly to say it — not love, not just yet, butmaybe it's the start of something good.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
